The Weird, Recursive “Mad Men” Ads

“Mad Men” is a prestigious television show with devoted fans who fit into a desirable demographic, and so its broadcaster, AMC, likely has little trouble selling the advertising spots. One can even imagine meetings in which men and women talk breathlessly about the opportunities for “synergy” in advertising for a hip and intensely fashionable show that is itself about advertising. And yet, there is a built-in challenge to placing commercials adjacent to the fictional ad world of Sterling, Cooper, et al. What digital-camera company would have wanted to come blaring into the gaps in the action after Don Draper had just defined nostalgia and conjured the Kodak Carousel? And yet, over the years, agencies and the companies that hire them have taken on the challenge, mostly to unmemorable dramatic results. But viewers of Season 6, which has its finale this Sunday, may have taken more notice of the ads this season, most obviously, because the faces and voices are so familiar.

The American Airlines ads that accompany the show feature the voice of its star, Jon Hamm, who is clearly playing a version of Don Draper in full-on closer mode. A recent one introduces American’s new lie-flat international seats:

The observation that it has become all to easy to forget that “you’re flying five hundred miles an hour on a chair that just became a bed” is a classic Draperism, highlighting the magnificence of technological innovation, and the ways in which it connects to deeply held, timeless notions of adventure and comfort. The tagline, “We’re putting the wonder back into air travel,” could be a shorthand for all of Don’s best pitches, and even suggests a tagline for the character himself: “Don Draper, putting the wonder back into consumer products since nineteen-fifty-something.”

In another American Airlines ad that has run this year, Hamm tells jaded airline passengers, “There’s a change in the air. Things feel different. New. Better. And tomorrow, they’ll be better still.” That, too, may sound familiar; it’s a version of the line that Don, in better days, spun out to all the company flacks who met with him. Hope. Change. The future. It’s so familiar because Don Draper said a version of the same thing about American Airlines, back in Season 2, when Sterling Cooper was angling to sign them as a client:

American Airlines is not about the past any more than America is. Ask not about Cuba, ask not about the bomb—we’re going to the moon. Throw everything out.… There is no such thing as American history, only a frontier.

Next up, the ever-present spot for Johnnie Walker Scotch whisky, which features a maddening little jazz number and a very famous female silhouette:

The subtext here—though to call it that insults both the concept of text and subtlety—has Christina Hendricks seducing insecure male drinkers into believing they can assert some lost ideal of masculine power by ordering a drink. This sell is akin to the Jaguar campaign from Season 5, which settled on the tagline: “At last, something beautiful you can truly own.” In this case, it’s a drink, not a finicky sports car, but in both ads we are told that what men really want to own is a woman.

While the ad connects with “Mad Men”’s often misogynistic sense of a women’s power, it also undermines the hard work that Hendricks and the show’s writers and directors have done to reveal that there is much more to the Joan character than just her near-terrorizing sexual allure: that people misjudge and underestimate her at their own peril. Even worse, the ad violates “Mad Men”’s own sometimes lofty definition of advertising as a kind of art. In Season 2, when Peggy tries to impress Don with her savvy by citing the aphorism that “sex sells,” Don shoots back, with a line that must have heartened modern ad people everywhere: “Says who? Just so you know, the people who talk that way think that monkeys can do this.”

From a dramatic point of view, let alone one of artistic integrity, it seems bad practice to have the ads feature the same actors that star in that show. “Mad Men,” with its soliloquies about the glories and pitfalls of the industry, has made lay ad critics of us all. But that constant prodding at the meaning of advertising in American culture has also made us especially attuned to the ways in which the show operates as an ad itself, selling nostalgia for all kinds of slightly unsavory things: an age of carefree smoking, drinking, and littering; rigorous attire; absentminded parenthood; retrograde class and gender roles. It is a show about marketing and artifice and the power and allure of the superficial—and whether “Mad Men” is a critique of these things or simply just another hedonistic luxury product is a reasonable question. It might be both. In a recent episode, Don Draper pleaded for an audience with Chevrolet, explaining that “the timbre of my voice is as important as the content.” You might say the same thing about “Mad Men,” at its best and worst.

In some ways, worrying about whether the advertising of real products diminishes the fictional world of “Mad Men” is wasted energy at this point. It either ceased to be a problem for viewers, or permanently became one, when an entire episode in the second season was structured around Heineken, which had made a placement deal with the show’s producers. And why not? The show is about selling products, and it has far greater resonance when those products are real. So why not help pay for the craft service at the same time? Following a high-profile contract dispute with the network, Matthew Weiner, the show’s creator, defended the limited use of product placement, and said that most of the real companies portrayed had not paid to appear. “I don’t want the audience to feel they are being sold on the show,” he said. But, of course, we are being sold something—all television is an extended dramatic pitch for our attention.

Central to that sales transaction have been the fictional ad campaigns that drive the show’s plot. In earlier seasons, “Mad Men” presented ad campaigns that were not only innovative for their historical period but more interesting than most contemporary ads. But as the real ads around the show have become homages to the most popular campaigns on “Mad Men,” the show’s newest ad pitches have turned lifeless and dull, shadows of the better ones that preceded them. Fans disappointed in the latest season who find themselves asking, “When was the last really good episode?,” might just as easily ask, “When was the last really good ad campaign on the show?”

The lacklustre ads fit into the general motif of dissolution and decay that has blanketed the season. Don’s disappearing-man ad for Royal Hawaiian was as bad as the client said it was, and the most recent pitch, in which Peggy attempts to market a health-care company by recreating a scene from “Rosemary’s Baby,” is downright loony. “Mad Men” has always been at its most entertaining when the creative professionals portrayed are making exciting things. It seems unlikely that Sterling, Cooper, and Partners will be leading any more real-life marketing trends based on their recent work. And that, finally, may be a good thing. Seeing the professional lives of the characters on “Mad Men” finally align with the rot of their personal lives has made the show a darker and less desirable cultural object, but perhaps a more truthful advertisement for a lifestyle that no one would want to buy.

Ian Crouch is a contributing writer and producer for newyorker.com. He lives in Maine.